I’m new to #Lemmy and making myself feel at home by posting a bit!

My first Linux distribution was elementary OS in early March 2020. Since then, I’ve tried Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, went back to Manjaro, and since early January 2023, I’ve landed on Debian as my home in the #Linux world.

What was your first Linux distro?

  • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nz
    13·
    5 days ago

    I started with Mandrake 6 when the there were lots of 9’s or 0’s in the year

    Then bounced from Slackware/opensuse/Red Hat/Debian/Gentoo/BSD

    Now running Kde Neon and MacOS (Debian and BSD as server OSs)

  • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    581·
    5 days ago

    Welcome to Lemmy stranger.

    Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾

      • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        111·
        5 days ago

        Honestly it still feels like home. Because I was kind of a moron and figured it would mean less to figure out, I registered darkstar.org (the default domain Slackware came set up with).

        I few years later I actually emailed Patrick Volkerding about something and he mentioned it… I felt this strange mix of pride and shame ;-)

    • jhdeval@lemmy.world
      10·
      5 days ago

      Well shit you got me beat I ran Slackware from 3.5 disks in the 90s on a 486dx2. I sent away for those disks to be mailed to me. I even did something crazy with that machine I had lots of ram so I sent them off to a company to combine them together. I want to say it 8 or 16 megabytes. Bit I can’t remember now.

      • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        That’s great, I didn’t even know that was a service you could get. I remember being really disappointed when I realized that a SIMM would not actually fit in one of my 386s ISA slots 😅

    • guy_threepwood@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 days ago

      I used Vector Linux 3.2, which was Slackware based, mostly because it was a small(ish) download on my friend’s Cable internet connection. Shortly after I moved to real Slackware. This was probably 2003/4

    • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      6·
      5 days ago

      Also Slackware!

      But I skipped from my 286 to a Pentium 133 (then went a bit backwards to a 486 dx100, then ahead to some cyrix and AMD).

      • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        It was such a cool time for CPUs. Going up a generation was like getting a supercomputer. And Intel had those cartridge CPUs…

        • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          3·
          4 days ago

          Such a wild time… I started building PCs for people (even my gym teacher), it was so fun - and yeah, such a huge jump every time!

          Now I have the same build for nearly 15 years with upgrades along the way, and my servers are all decom’d t/m/m PCs.

          Edit: Jump had a typo

  • Aggravationstation@feddit.uk
    3·
    5 days ago

    First attempt was Slackware, installed from a CD that came with a magazine because we didn’t have the internet in about 2001 or 2002. It worked for one glorious afternoon but I’d tried to dual boot with Windows and nuked that partition. Got into big trouble and was banned from the family computer for the rest of the summer. Couldn’t try again until a couple of years later when I got my very own laptop and paid my friend £5 to leave his PC on overnight downloading an ISO of dynebolic over dial up and burn it to a CD for me.

    That was great but then I got my hands on a beefier PC and used Ubuntu thanks to the free CDs you could get in the mail. When I finally got a job and a broadband connection I switched to Mandriva, then Ubuntu again for a few years with most of that being Xubuntu and for like the last 10 years mostly Debian. I switched to Fedora a couple of times and tried a few others like MX Linux and Qubes. I also had a Pinebook Pro for a while running Manjaro ARM. I just always ended up going back to Debian. I can’t see myself ever changing distros again.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    2·
    5 days ago

    I played a bit with Suse around 2000, but I switched to Linux as my main OS with Ubuntu in 2005.
    Now I use Manjaro, because I like the rolling release concept, and it’s easy to use different kernels, and it’s a good KDE distro IMO.
    In my experience it’s also among the best for Steam games.

  • Carrot@lemmy.today
    1·
    5 days ago

    I grew up a windows user, as was my father before me. I first started with Linux in my teens, initially on Raspbian as I was gifted a raspberry pi 2b with a camera, and I wanted to try goofing around with python and computer vision (which was the style at the time.) Once I entered university, I dual booted Windows 7 and Linux Mint, since my professor suggested moving to Linux for C++ homework to make things simpler. I was scared of jumping to a new desktop OS due to my upbringing, so I couldn’t abandon Windows, not yet anyway. Following that I had a cheap Summer fling with Kali as it was a requirement for a cyber security course I took. This replaced my Mint install. After college I got into self-hosting, and my server ran Debian for stability (and still does to this day), however I was still scared of leaving the safety of my littlr Windows garden I called home. But then Windows betrayed me by putting ads on my taskbar, and I got fed up. I installed EndeavorOS on my main machine which was a laptop. I immediately fell head over heels for the AUR, and not needing a deep understanding of linux during the install was a plus. I got comfy with the ins and outs of linux over the next year and a half or so, and when I finally went to build myself a new desktop PC, I made the switch to Arch. It’s been great, and I felt like I understood all the decisions I made during the install. That was 6 months ago. If Arch ever fails me catastrophically,(which would be pretty hard as I am using an os snapshot manager, and backing those snapshots up to my server) I will move to either Debian or Mint for stability, as I am kind of tired of hopping around at this point.

  • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
    1·
    5 days ago

    Ubuntu 16.04, dual booted on my laptop before I knew how much of a hassle that could be! Fortunately, never had any of the infamous issues.

  • algernon@lemmy.ml
    10·
    5 days ago

    SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.

    I’m not a big distrohopper…

      • algernon@lemmy.ml
        3·
        5 days ago

        I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt’t yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.

        By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.

        My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.

        I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.

        On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of /persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they’re pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.

        In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.

        Oh, and nixos’s packaging story is much more convenient than Debian’s (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).

        • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
          1·
          4 days ago

          Thank you. Glad I’m not alone in this quest with that kind of history.

          My current desktop is Wheezy inside a VM - also across several platforms, but VMware, by design , doing the heavy lifting.

          Anything of note, essentially everything except Audacity, is running on a Bookworm Docker host with X11 forwarding and reverse mount sshfs, so all the container “sees” is the directory I give it.

          I’ve made several attempts to move away from Wheezy, but there’s too many scripts in my ~/bin directory to make that simple.

          The “fresh paint smell” experience for me comes from a docker pull or docker build, but it does require hardware capabilities that died eight months or so ago, when my 64 GB RAM iMac died. No data loss, just endless frustration.

          At the moment I’m exploring EC2 on demand. I suspect that for the $10k I previously spent on hardware, I can always have the latest on tap, but I’m still trying to get real-time audio editing to not be a weekly disaster. Getting closer, but not quite there yet.

          I’ll have a squiz at NixOS, seems like an interesting approach.

          Much obliged for sharing your experience!

      • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
        9·
        5 days ago

        Not the guy who first commented, but NixOS is fun because you can have the whole config in a git repo, and can easily reproduce. Main drawback is that Nix as a language is insane and that a lot of packages still aren’t available

        • algernon@lemmy.ml
          3·
          5 days ago

          While I am not a fan of Nix the language, it is no more insane than ansible or kubernetes yaml soups.

          As for packages… nixpkgs is by far the largest repo of packaged software. There are very few things I haven’t found there - and they are usually not in any other distro either.

  • nightmare786@leminal.spaceEnglish
    25·
    5 days ago

    am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.

    i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though

      • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
        1·
        4 days ago

        Real!

        After installing and restoring Arch for the third time in 1.5 year I decided to go back to Mint. In the past 5.5 or so years, nothing needed to be reinstalled or restored; Mint’s more stable than Windows by now!

    • Broken@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 days ago

      There’s something about simplicity that is underated.

      Technically my first ditro was SuSE a loooong time ago but I didn’t stick with it. Then back when Ubuntu became he new hit thing I tried that, but again didn’t stick with it.

      I have now loaded up Mint and that’s the one I’m running with. Mind you, all distros have come a long way since my prior Linux dealings but Mint is the one to make me permanently switch.

  • nabladabla@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    3 days ago

    Ubuntu 5.10 back when a random Finnish teenager could ask Canonical for free install CDs and they’d just mail them to you no money asked.